This blog has yet to post its first content while administrative matters are being straightened out and the design fiddled with. It’s being set up by Roger Sperberg in conjunction with electronic and printed books of the same content.

For now, find out about this remarkable device at Nokia’s N900 page.

So I've been working on accelerating the Open Build Service recently.

Sorry to be picking on Ovi.com again, but it has been a few months and recent developments (such as announcement of Nokia's N900 tablet phone) beg an update. [...]

Nokia N900 has been finally announced, oh yes! This is the device I am really, really looking forward to get - even more than any new Android device that could possibly get released this Autumn/Winter. Having some previous experience with Nokia Internet Tablets, and now reading the official specs of N900 I can without much hesitation say that N900 is going to be groundbreaking device for Nokia and is quite likely going to lead the path that future handsets from Finland might follow.

Read more »

Before Nokia World is scheduled to start, an early Nokia N900 video preview posted by kiamanokia.it found its way to Youtube. For those of us who didn’t learn the Italian language, we can put it on mute and preview the usage of multiple home-screens, widgets, multiple opened web pages, zoom function, and photo gallery.

Did anyone else say WOW at this video?!? The Nokia N900’s UI looks nice and seem to be very responsive. One thing I don’t like is the twirling motion to zoom within the web browser. I think is unnecessary. I hope we can still double tap to zoom in or out. We’ll find out very soon!

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like…

• Review: Simple Brightness Applet for Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 1-Minute Multitasking Demo
• Nokia N900 Demo – Share Your Life with Pixelpipe
• The Nokia Blog’s Nokia N900 Hands-On Video

This isn't a Nokia World update - you'll have to wait for tomorrow for that (well, later today!)

The monthly maemo.org sprint meeting was held today (first Tuesday of the month). The committed tasks, and meeting actions, are now published in the usual location:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_Sprints/September_09

The main themes of the sprint are:

• Packages being usable (and used) for Fremantle testing by people with devices in hand
• Some automatic checks to prevent duff packages getting into -testing
• SSO: accounts sync API between various systems
• Published documentation on server upgrades
• Council election held and results published
• Community days of summit finalised
• Sponsorship rejection/approval requests sent for everyone
• Capacity planning for Fremantle

Each task in the sprint is assigned a MoSCoW prioritisation: one of must, should, could (or won't). The following people have committed to organise tasks in this sprint:

• Ferenc Szekely (1 MUST, 1 COULD)
• Jeremiah Foster (1 MUST, 2 COULDs)
• Quim Gil (1 MUST, 1 SHOULD, 1 COULD)
• Tim Samoff (1 MUST)
• Andre Klapper (1 MUST)
• Andrew Flegg (2 MUSTs)
• Niels Breet (1 MUST, 2 SHOULDs, 1 COULD)
• Dave Neary (2 MUSTs, 1 SHOULD)
• Valerio Valerio (1 MUST, 1 action)
• Jamie Benett (1 MUST)
• Carsten Munk (1 SHOULD)
• Daniel Wilms (1 COULD)

Day-to-day activities will be reported on the Qaiku #maemork channel.

The next sprint meeting will be held under a new Maemo Community Council on Tuesday, 6th October 2009 at 13:30 UTC.

Apart from the promo video - which everybody has probably already seen - , there has been a couple of extra  interesting post on youtube
The first one is a small presentation from our friends from marketing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP5R-5NX1BE&feature=PlayList&p=32A4BB8E620CF809&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=19

....But my favorite would have to be this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WhyrhWsMFk

It only has a couple of hundred hits on youtube so far but it is building a cult following which should rank it right up there with the productions of Andy Warhol and Luis Bunuel in a matter of months...and will also probably trigger a long series of such alternative weird videos to my greatest pleasure...

Italian website kiamanokia.it/ has somehow managed to get its hands on the Nokia N900 ahead of Nokia World, which kicks off in a few hours, and put together a short video preview. The video explores the various aspects of the phone, including the hardware, but also digs into the software quite a bit, showing off the homescreen and other features.

I’ll have some quality time with the N900 myself later this afternoon -- are there any things you’d like me to specifically check out? I’ll do my best to check out whatever aspects you’d like, and I’ll definitely have some video footage, as well as side-by-side comparisons against the Nokia N810, which I’ll be blogging with throughout Nokia World 2009.

Random Posts

• NoBounds And The N810 Show The Future Of The Internet Tablets
• Android Is Live On Internet Tablets
• New Firmware for N800 and N95, and new PC Suite
• Debian Linux On The Internet Tablet Made Simple
• Discovering The N810 -- First Hands-On

As part of the official launch of Maemo 5 and the N900 at Nokia World 2009, I have been given a brief hands-on time on the N900, and now I can relate some of my impressions of the device and operating system as a tablet owner and maemo.org community member.

As promised, I’ve had the chance to compare the Nokia N900 side-by-side with its older brother, the N810 Internet Tablet. As you can see, the N900 is quite a bit smaller, but it also has a smaller keyboard and not quite the best viewing angle, specifically for watching video.

We’ll have more coverage of the N900 over the next few days.

Related Posts

• More Nokia N900 Hands-On Video
• Guided Walkthrough Of The Nokia N900
• Off To Nokia World 2009
• Pre-Order Your Nokia N900 Now
• Theme Maker Updated For Nokia N900/Maemo 5

Hey there. I've been extremely busy working on a very important project which is driving me and almost half of our crew mad. :P

Although it is true that the development of Canola is happening in a very slow pace, it doesn't mean that we have left the development behind. Actually many interesting things have happened lately, including of the closing of Google Summer of Code program. My very special thanks to all the people involved, students, mentors and administrators.

Coming back to the subject of this post, now that the new device is officially launched and all its features have been widely discussed all over the internet, I can share with you these pictures I've been holding for a while: Canola running on the N900.





It's still early work in progress and it is quite unstable, but I must say that it runs very smoothly, almost compared to Canola running on a regular computer. And it fits very well with the reduced size of the N900 screen.

It took me a lot of work to push all the dependencies to the extras-devel repository, always keeping in mind the backwards compatibility with Chinook and Diablo. We're still missing the proper package for Canola itself, because I wanted to make sure that it really worked before pushing it to the repositories. So, thanks to all the python goodness, it was just a matter of copying the source tree to the device and running it from the X Terminal. :D





Now back to work.

There was one Nokia N900 in a room of 15 bloggers, so trying to get my hands on it was not that easy. I haven’t spent much time actually using it and I’m sure I will later on today. For now, I hope these hands-on photos make you drool.

Wifi signal is very weak at the current room we’re in, so trying to load a webpage isn’t working. The web browser is an aspect of the Nokia N900 I really want to check out.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like…

• Nokia N900 Review
• Firefox for Maemo Beta 5 Released But Slower and Less Accurate than Default Browser
• Tmobile USA Speed Tests on Nokia N900 24 hrs After the Outage – Faster?
• Nokia N900 Preview of Qik

We are looking for talented and dedicated software specialists to join the Maemo Internet Browser team in Helsinki, Finland:

• Browser Technology Engineer - HEL000001J5
• Browser Technology Engineer - HEL000001KI
• Senior Software Engineer - ITÄ00000011
• Browser Integration Engineer - ITÄ00000010

Watch here what we do:

Can’t get enough of the Nokia N900? I’ve got a special Nokia N900 video walkthrough for you. Jussi Mäkinen, Marketing Manager at Maemo Devices (and a fan of The Nokia Blog), shows off the Nokia N900 for our camera. Take a look.

You can also watch this video in HD on Youtube.

In this video, you can see the how the contacts list works, the multiple home screens with Twitter and Facebook widgets, the quick and responsive transitions, and more. I don’t want to ruin it for you, so just watch the 6-minute video and let us know what you think!

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like…

• Review: Simple Brightness Applet for Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 1-Minute Multitasking Demo
• Nokia N900 Demo – Share Your Life with Pixelpipe
• Video: Nokia N900 Walkthrough by KiAmaNokia

There has bee a lots of interest around this new device and the Maemo 5 operating system. Lots of positive comments and then I have read some comments where people doubt that the transitions would be just some flash animations and not a real thing (which of course is not true). Well, this is a OpenGL hardware accelerated Maemo device, and all you see is real. Quim Gil just posted on Twitter a link to a new video showing how the Maemo UI works, if you had doubts, you can put the doubt aside and see by yourself. The user experience is slick and beautiful.

The Maemo Summit 2009 is quickly approaching, and we've been busy processing the sponsorship requests we've received so far. For those of you who haven't registered, now is the time to do so. September 9th is the last day to register for sponsorship. So if you require financial assistance to attend, that will be your final chance to apply.

Many of the requests have already been processed and some of you will already have received emails indicating your sponsorship status. For those of you whose sponsorship requests have been accepted, details about travel arrangements will follow. For those of you have been rejected, we apologize, the sponsorship budget was not unlimited so, sadly, there simply wasn't enough cash to bring everybody. If you're attendance was not hinging on sponsorship approval and you'd still like to come to the Summit, then you'll need to re-register on the Summit page. Apologies for the inconvenience.

If you are still waiting on a response to your sponsorship request don't worry! We're still working our way through the list of requests and some requests simply haven't been reviewed yet.

Any questions should be mailed to council@maemo.org.

Nokia World 2009 in brief There's been plenty of coverage already on this eye-popping event so I'll limit my analysis to just a few points. [...]

**UPDATE** Read the comments for better perspective!

All the posts about the N900 are swirling around. It is indeed a VERY sexy device and I am proud maemo development team for producing such an amazing piece of technology.

The price ... What can I say? 500 British pounds = 812.5 U.S. dollars

What's the target market for the N900 at that rate? This may be status quo for luxury devices in some parts of the world, but Nseries phones never took off in the US. My guess: Wealthy hackers who aren't already fascinated by iPhones or Android phones. I am sure both of them will be thrilled to buy it. For perspective, here is some more stuff you can buy for US $800:

Electronics: (prices as of today from bestbuy.com)
A Dell Studio Core2Duo T6500, 4GB, DVDRW, 17" Widescreen, 320GB HDD.
An LG 42" 1080p LCD HDTV
Three Asus Eee 900 netbooks

I suppose cutting-edge technology deserves a cutting-edge price, but the US consumer luxury device is lower than it has been in a long time. It's a good thing for Nokia that they don't focus on the US for their success.

• Nokia World 09: Nokia N900 offers voice calls, Skype and Google Talk
• Hands on: Nokia N900 review
• Hands on with the Nokia N900 and Maemo 5
• http://www.twitvid.com/player/13ADD

Open source is about opening things up... right?
Well, yes.
But I think there's more to it than that.

Time to switch to a Linux phone and time to start preparing ogg-support for N900/Fremantle.

Hopefully everything will be easier to get working with the N900 since at least the closed source Metalayer Crawler is replaced with open source Tracker.

I would like to hear if there’s anything special people would like to get with ogg-support. Support for oggs in the built-in media player with tags is of course the first goal but is there something else that is a must? Theora? Flac?

Thanks.

During next Maemo Summit we will have at least 2 hours (one on saturday and another one on sunday) of lightning talks, about 20 talks where people will try to explain or present something in just 5 minutes.

Last year, during Maemo Summit 2008, I did a lightning talk too and I must admit: even if I knew a lot about the subject of my talk and even if I had already done many other talks, I think it wasn't so good as I expected.

This year I've been selected again (more details will follow) to give a 5 minutes talk and with this great news the kind Dave Neary also suggested me a link with an article about some best practices when giving lightning talks. I'll try to resume the most important points, hoping this will be useful for people who is going to give a short presentation at Summit.

Go straight to the point: five minutes finish sooner than you can expect. You have to talk about the main topic of your talk within the two first minutes, else you risk to talk too much about the rest and you couldn't have the time for the most important thing.

Leave details away: people will never remember too many details explained in so little time. It's better to leave them away and put them in a more detailed blog post that you can link within your slides.

Slides: for a five minute talk you can avoid preparing slides, but if this can help you to concentrate on points you have to talk about, please prepare them. Two or three slides can be useful to introduce yourself, to write any reference of what you're talking about many other things. Another important thing, make sure your slides are ready before starting your presentation: people don't want to wait 20-30 seconds it takes to start Open Office or any other similar application.

Consider any eventuality: the presentation file could be damaged (be sure to have a copy of it, better in PDF format), your laptop could have no more battery (make sure you've a copy of your slides in a USB key), aliens could take you away, ecc... (ok, this last eventuality is remote).

Concluding your talk: don't worry if you finish one or two minutes before, people won't bother about it. It's better to finish one minute before than 30 seconds later. If you want to leave an URL where people can find more details, how to contact you, put it in every slide so people will be able to take note of it from the first minute.

I hope to have resumed the most important points of the original article. If you think there are any other important things to say, please leave me a comment and I'll add them. I really hope you will enjoy Maemo Summit and its lightning talks!

Hello everybody. Today I’d like to share my thoughts about upcomming Maemo 5 release (along with new highly anticipated hardware) and it’s window to the internet, in other words – browser. First of all it’s cool to see “mouse over” mode (as I was calling it long ago, but haven’t got time to describe it in pictures [...]

I bumped into Brett Butterfield, CEO and founder of Pixelpipe during the first day of Nokia World. I told him I love the service and have been using it frequently with my Nokia phones. I also told him that I had my hands on the Nokia N900 and hope that Pixelpipe works on it. I was in luck. He asked permission from Nokia then got the green light to demo it for The Nokia Blog!

You can also watch this video in HD on Youtube. I’m sorry about the glare in some parts of the video. My right eye was bothering me during the demo and could not clearly see the camera LCD preview.

Pixelpipe rocks because it is the best way to share photos, videos, and more from the phone to the web. I use it frequently to upload photos and videos to Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook directly from the camera on Nokia phones. There are more than 100 places to choose from! If you haven’t heard of Pixelpipe yet, watch Brett explain it while using the much highly anticipated Nokia N900.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like…

• Review: Simple Brightness Applet for Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 1-Minute Multitasking Demo
• The Nokia Blog’s Nokia N900 Hands-On Video
• Video: Nokia N900 Walkthrough by KiAmaNokia

We had a good few days @ Nokia world in Stuttgart. Nokians, journalist, analysts, partners, operators, Maemo.org dudes, etc. I received overwhelmingly positive feedback from people once they saw a N900 in action. But then again, I do not know what they talked behind my back.

Or actually I do. Very positive comments also in various blogs and articles. People understand what we are doing and they like the product.

It is all about
1) Internet (browsing, chatting, sharing, talking ....) first
2) Open source & collaborative development for consumers
3) True computer experience in a small package

Alan has a nice story @ maemo.org.

First, I'm sorry but this isn't an N900 post :) instead I've been looking at one of the areas that's holding back Mer. It's fairly simple conceptually: just handling interaction between various parts of the system; and by this I mean things like screen dimming; what happens when you press the power key; shutting down when the battery is low; waking up for an alarm... Things that should just work.  Well, I think I have a potential solution. (Oh, and some of you may be interested... I also found out how far eclipse has come in the UML modelling space too!)

I proposed a talk at the summit on DVCS and git and it has not been accepted (or rejected) by the talk selection group. This isn't a complaint  :)     . . . . .   however I do worry that it might worth pushing ... what do you think? (Breaking news... sounds like there has been an acceptance - also it may make sense to do a BOF session after any presentations). I still would appreciate feedback - what' important to you?

Well, last day of Tokamak. It’s sad that I must say goodbye to all of these people that actually lived with me for one week. It was so intense that I almost didn’t realize that we were together for one week. But let’s talk about what we did during the sprint.

In anticipation of possibly attending the Maemo 2009 Summit in Amsterdam, I recently began soliciting input first for a presentation topic and second for guidance on content. [...]

This is my account of the experience that Andrew Flegg and I had while at Nokia World 2009 in Stuttgart, Germany. Both of us were able to get an insight into what Nokia is currently up to as well as some of the future endeavors of the Maemo Devices team. Likewise, we both tweeted a lot during the conference. But, tweets...? Well, they’re not always the best format for others to get a summary of everything was reported. That’s what this article is all about. Lastly, if you’d like a much more in depth look at the Nokia N900, please view Alan Bruce’s account here.

Click to read 3028 more words

If you’re in the Maemo community, you know who Dr. Ari Jaaksi is. He’s ‘the’ guy at Nokia for Maemo, and he was kind enough to sit down with us at Nokia World 2009 to chat about the Nokia N900 and what it means for Nokia and for Maemo. As Anssi Vanjoki pointed out in his keynote speech – the Nokia N900 is step 4 in the 5-step process that is Maemo, which is actually rather encouraging.

Enjoy the video below, and expect more video footage of this sweet new device, as well as some commentary on what I think it means to the Maemo community and more importantly, to the Symbian community, soon.

Related Posts

• Nokia World 2009 Videos: Ewan MacLeod Of Mobile Industry Review
• Guided Walkthrough Of The Nokia N900
• Pre-Order Your Nokia N900 Now
• Off To Nokia World 2009
• Nokia Wants You To PUSH The N900

Maemo-guru has done a good job recording what seems to be a press sit-down interview session with Dr. Ari Jaaksi, Nokia VP for Maemo Devices during the recent Nokia World 2009 at Stuttgart, Germany.

The video is about 30 minutes full of great info. A must watch.

Thanks Ricky!

Hey fellow Maemo Bloggers! For those of you who don’t know, aside from running Maemo Talk, which is by the way in no way connected to Nokia nor maemo.org, I’m actually the official administrator of the “Talk” section of maemo.org which is known as talk.maemo.org or tmo.

tmo is maemo.org’s official forum. It’s a place where Maemo enthusiasts, developers, and the curious, meet to talk about anything Maemo. Folks from the Nokia Maemo team also frequent the forums to answer questions and share information. It’s really a great forum.

As most of you might have noticed, the first tab at the right side of this blog displays the latest discussion threads at tmo. I’m doing this so visitors of this blog would hopefully notice it, click on a link, open tmo, and if they like what they see, join tmo.

Now, I’m posting this to hopefully convince some of you to do the same on your blog. I have created a feed to easily do this. All you have to do is code the following to your blog template, where you want the tmo active topics to appear (top, left or right sidebar, bottom, etc.):

<?php
$tmo = file_get_contents('http://talk.maemo.org/getLatest.php');
echo $tmo;
?>

That’s it! You can actually see how it will look by visiting the link directly.

I do believe that if more people talk about Maemo at tmo, the better the discussion will be, the better maemo.org will become, and Maemo devices will improve for the better.

If you are planning to use this code, post a quick reply so I can get an idea how many will be using it.

Thanks.

Reggie Suplido

Thomas Thurman has posted short but excellent tutorials on how to develop apps for the Nokia N900.

On Part 1 of Thomas’ tutorial, he shows how to create a client for the social bookmarking site reddit. He provides the links to references and downloads, which are quite handy for first-time developers.

On Part 2, Thomas talks about packaging. He also adds an icon to his Raeddit app, and then shows a screencast on how it looks so far.

I hope he keeps creating tutorials as it looks like more and more newer developers would look at developing for the N900 and Maemo 5 soon.

Check out his tutorial page.

EDIT: added Part 2.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-08-31 through 2009-09-06

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-08-31 through 2009-09-06

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-08-31 through 2009-09-06

N900 public launch and announcement...that went all right...Bloggers blogged. Twitters tweetted. People got excited... a dozen millions hits on the maemo5 website within 24 hours...Genuine interest all around.
Then came Nokia world....And the first opportunity for hands-on reviews...What was the result?. Reviews were mostly positive and the buzz was remarkable on the floor of Nokia world.

So far, so good.

But it's not over until it´s over.Until the device is in the hands of customers and people start loving the device, all of  this means very little-The only thing that can be said at that point is that people understand what this device is about and what we tried to do.

So, let's keep up the good work, let's stay focus...We are on the right path.

Yannick


PS: a few reviews were the N900 was mentioned.  techradar, pocket-lint, mobile-ent, business24

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

You wanted big, fat, lazy "business." We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today's markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn't care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

The Full Article

I am having one of those "long time no blogging" moments again But whatever, I have some thoughts I have wanted to blog about, and also a goodie for those of you who are enjoying the new Maemo and the N900 device already.

Nokia Conversations recently ran a “What’s your favorite product from Nokia World?” poll. The results are in and the Nokia N900 wins it hands down receiving 68% of the 2670 votes. Honestly, I didn’t get to see the poll, but I guess you all know which device I will be voting for anyway.

I’ve also seen the same effect at talk.maemo.org where majority of the threads right now there are about the Nokia N900. Here’s an interesting stat: Since Sept 1 (until the time I’m writing this), 86% of the posts at talk.maemo.org are about the N900.

Did Nokia underestimate how good the Nokia N900 really is? Check out this article from Unwired View.

Just set up a blog just for maemo related things.

The nomination period for candidatures for the Q3 2009 Maemo community council election is now open.

Candidates eligible for election according to the rules of the council can be nominated by anyone in the community. If a maemo.org community member nominates someone other than themselves, the nomination must be accepted by the nominee before it is official.

Nominations may be made before 23:59 UTC, September 20th, at which time
a voting period of one week will open, by sending an email to the
maemo-community mailing list with the subject “Council Nomination:”
followed by the name of the nominee. Nominations can be confirmed by the
nominee replying to this email.

I encourage anyone who would like to be on the council to nominate
themselves early, and I would encourage all community members to be
forthcoming with questions for the candidates.

Important election dates:

Sept 7

Nominations open for Maemo Community Council elections

Sept 21

Nominations close, voting opens

Sept 28

Voting closes, provisional results declared

Oct 5

If no challenges are upheld, results for elections are final

Good luck to all!

Yesterday we released WebKitGTK+ 1.1.14, Epiphany 2.27.92 and Epiphany-Extensions 2.27.92. I haven’t blogged about releases in a while (sorry!), and as the good people at Ars Technica mention development is moving at a “swift rate” (btw Ryan, you can remove the ugly hack to get the contents of the page from your app and use the new and shiny WebKitDataSource APIs) , so there’s a lot of ground to cover. I won’t go through all the APIs and fixes we have done in the last months though, you can always check the NEWS file for a brief summary, or check our documentation page to see what new APIs landed on each release.

Ton Roosendaal (on the left)

I’m very pleased to share that the opening keynote for the community days during the Maemo Summit will be Ton Roosendaal of the Blender Foundation. It’s been my pleasure to know Ton, mostly from afar, for the past few years, and he is one of the most amazing people I know in the free software world.

Ton is one of those people who has a sense of doing things big, and doing them right. Over the past few years, Ton has raised money to hire artists and developers to work on commercial quality films and games, resulting in Project Orange, Project Apricot, Project Peach and now Project Durian is in pre-production (you can buy your copy now and get your name on the credits!), with the goal of showing off what Blender can do and making the program better by working closely with artists to see what needs work. The results are truly impressive, and the amount of foresight and hard work which went into getting each of these projects off the ground and completed is amazing.

The Blender community is also amazing. Ton has continually given passionate users a reason to stay around, and ways to help the project, and that has been rewarded by a diverse community of artists and developers working together. The BlenderNation fan/news site is a testament to the creativity and passion of the community.

I’m really looking forward to hearing Ton speak.

Quim Gil, Nokia Maemo Devices Open Source Advocate, has started a thread at talk.maemo.org to define the ways to contact, as well as influence the Nokia Maemo Devices Team.

He mentions several ways of doing it like actively reporting bugs (Bugzilla), proposing new ideas and solutions (Brainstorm),  rate news and blog items (News and Planet), rate and provide feedback on apps (Downloads), contact developers directly (maemo-developers mailing list and Development forum), join the discussions (Community forum and Sprints), and nominate and vote for your  Maemo Community Council candidates as they will have a direct line to Nokia.

Notice that all these channels point to maemo.org, the home of the open source Maemo community. If you are not yet a member, join now (here and here), and let your voice and ideas be heard.

No, I’m not going to talk about those little and tasty pieces of chocolate, but about Maemo and Multimedia

If you have a fresh installation of Maemo 5 Beta2 SDK, and you have tried to play a mp3 either with MAFW or just with gst-launch, you should have noticed it doesn’t work. That’s because, as pointed out in the Developer Guide, SDK is distributed with almost no codecs, being the mp3 one of those missing codecs.

As I work with a lot of mp3 when developing MAFW, I’ve decided to put here the required package to be able to play mp3 files in the scratchbox (x86 target). Basically, it’s the same package that comes in Debian Stable, but compiled for scratchbox. Install and you’ll be able to play your mp3 collection.

Enjoy your tasty and musical environment!

You’ve seen Ari’s video, here is Peter Schneider’s demo / interview at Nokia World 2009. Peter is the Nokia Maemo Devices Marketing Head.

The videos are divided into several parts so you might want to skip some and watch those you might find more interesting. Thanks to MForum.ru for recording and compiling these vids.

Nokia N900 Demo:

Instant Messaging on the N900:

About APIs:

Nokia N900 Apps and Price Policy:

Who will create apps for the Nokia N900?

What would be Nokia’s next Maemo device?

Will we see more Maemo devices coming?

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

A quote from a longtime maemo.org member combined with a brief passage in the book I'm currently reading got me thinking lately about measuring social interactions and expectations. [...]

I finally got around to redesign parts of the dialogs in gPodder for Maemo 4, because some dialogs were still not really finger-friendly and usable. It's still a work-in-progress, but it looks really slick already and the whole UI is completely finger-friendly.

Let me show you some highlights (gPodder 0.17.0 is the current version available in Maemo Extras and "some old version" is from April 2008):

Pretty icons and slicker UI for the main window (compared to the same window in gPodder 0.17.0 and some old version).

The updated podcast directory dialog allows easy discovery of new content (compared to the same dialog in gPodder 0.17.0 and some old version).

The new episodes dialog shows more text and has finger-friendly rows (compared to the same dialog in gPodder 0.17.0 and some old version).

You will be able to filter the episode view and only show downloaded or unplayed episodes (a new feature!).

The complete set of screenshots can be found on Flickr.

The only place where the Playstation 3 Slim is actually more expensive than the regular one (US$ 1,093.25 versus US$814.33 as of today at one of the biggest internet stores here).

GSSDP 0.7 released!
Click to read 1684 more words
    

I got thumbnails working in Rygel. :) Right now rygel doesn't generate the thumbnails on it's own but provide thumbnails if already generated by another application (e.g nautilus) and stored in the freedesktop or maemo (they are almost the same) standard location. It works on both desktop and N900 and now that gupnp stack has been released, a rygel release with this and some other cool features will arrive shortly. :)

Now it's very easy for me to find the videos of my friends.

Gustavo has written a nice sumary of all the new APIs in 1.1.14 (yes, all that stuff was only for 1.1.14!), so go and check it out if you are interested.

Possibly I’m about to make a fool of myself saying this, but since I wasted some time a few days ago I might help someone doing it.

Say you are debugging some feature in your program that is enabled with some command line paramater (“random” example: the –private option in Epiphany for private profiles). One way of passing this to gdb is the –args flag, but another one is to pass them to run/r in the prompt, like:

(gdb) r –private

You do your stuff, and then you decide you need to see what happens without the option. One “obvious” way to do it would be to write, after the previous line:

(gdb) r

Right? Wrong. From the GDB manual:

run with no arguments uses the same arguments used by the previous run, or those set by the set args command.

So you’d be basically running your program with –private again. The right way to do it, as the manual says, is to reset the arguments with ’set args’.

I wonder how many silly things I have done through the years without noticing because I didn’t know this.

It must have been lost somewhere in the specs, but the Nokia N900 actually does have an Infrared (IR) port. A programmable remote control app is coming to the N900 called Irreco, which will take advantage of the N900’s IR.

From the looks of it, you can program your own remote, customize the buttons layout, and download pre-programmed remotes and themes. If the N900’s IR is strong enough, this can eventually replace the $250 Logitech Harmony Universal Remote.

Any chance of adding bluetooth remote support for the PS3?

Check out the video demo of Irreco:

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

With a price-tag of $650 US, could this be the end of the beloved tablet? Well at least perhaps for me www.nokiausa.com is now accepting pre-orders for the N900, Nokia’s first Maemo based phone, and Nokia’s fourth generation Maemo device. I have been an avid user of the Nokia 770, 800, 810 since 2005. I [...]

While at Nokia World 2009 last week, I was able to get one of the folks on the Experience Lounge floor to give a guided tour of the new Nokia N900, which is powered by Nokia’s Maemo 5 operating system. In the demo, you can get a great feel for the smoothness of the device, as well as some of the additional features that have not been mentioned in other videos.

Related Posts

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• Off To Nokia World 2009
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If you’ve been wondering what the ‘Experience Lounge’ looked like during the recently concluded Nokia World 2009 at Stuttgart, Germany, my good pal Rafe Blanford of All About Symbian has produced two short videos, as he goes around the show floor. You can expect to see all the newly announced Nokia products, plus a short clip of the Nokia N900’s Bounce Revolution game on part II at about the 1:55 mark.

Oh,  here’s an interesting quote from Rafe regarding the Nokia N97 mini and the N900:

“Well it is a bit controversial to say this, with so many geeks listening to this, this N97 mini will out sell the N900 because it’s a more accessible device. You’ve heard it here first.”

…

“This is gonna be the device to watch, not for all the geeks because they will be playing with their N900s…”

Here’s are some interesting and quite funny quotes from Rafe regarding the Nokia N97 mini: “Well it is a bit controvesial to say this, with so many geeks listening to this, this N97 mini will out sell the N900 because it’s a more accessible device. You’ve heard it here first.” and “This is the gonna be device to watch, not for all the geeks because they will be playing with their N900s…”

Part I:

Part II:

At the risk of starting a trend over personal-type articles I wanted to take time out from all the Maemo and information management stuff to post a disclaimer. [...]

David Rivas, Nokia’s vice president for devices R&D, told Reuters that Nokia plans to skip operator tailoring for Linux Maemo phones like the upcoming Nokia N900. Analysts say Nokia cannot afford to do this and risks refusal of the carriers to offer the device.

“Very clearly Apple, Android … are a whole lot less about providing customization to the operators and a whole lot more about providing a really cool, compelling value proposition to the end-consumer,” David Rivas, Nokia’s vice president for devices R&D, told Reuters.

“We have an opportunity, that we are going to take advantage of, with Maemo platform to play the game a little bit more along those lines than with Symbian lines,” Rivas said.

I don’t think this affects high-end consumers like me especially in the United States. I’ve never bought anything from the carrier because the Nokia phones I wanted weren’t sold by my carrier. I’ve always purchased unlocked phones, either from the the Nokia flagship stores or Amazon. However, I’m not the typical consumer.

AT&T recently sold the Nokia E71x, which was a good sign of things to come, but it had customizations that restricted certain features while also forcing people to pay a higher data plan than unlocked Nokia E71 users. The customizations may be perfectly fine to most new consumers, but certainly not those used to the freedom with unlocked phones.

Update. Official Nokia Conversations site says that this is incorrect and there are many customization points for operators.

This week, there have been a number of speculative stories suggesting that Nokia will not allow for operator customization of Maemo devices. Seems a few people are getting ahead of themselves. As we have said over the past couple of weeks, our plan with Maemo is to focus on the consumer experience – integrating applications and services from Nokia, our broad community of developers and publishers and, of course, from our operator customers. While we have not announced immediate plans to offer an operator variant for the N900, there are many customization points for operators on the N900. It would be absolutely incorrect to assume that we will not offer operators the ability to tailor future Maemo devices to suit their needs.

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I wonder if it was a mistake to adopt the “evaluate as they come in” method for Maemo Summit presentations. As we received proposals, for each proposal on its merits we said yes, no or maybe. If you were a yes, you were added to the schedule. A no got a nice email. A maybe stayed in the queue.

We set a deadline for submissions of September 13th, but this was a deadline for us to finish the schedule, not for people who wanted to give presentations to submit. I said as much in the call for content: “The final deadline for submissions will be September 13th but the sooner you submit your proposal the better chances you will have to get a slot”.

After Nokia World, a bunch of people came out of the woodwork to propose quality presentations, and after reviewing pending proposals last week, we now have an agenda which is almost full – there are 5 open slots and about 8 open lightning talk slots, about half of which are potentially taken already.

So it’s slightly frustrating to see 16 new submissions come in over the past 2 days as people saw the deadline arriving and the schedule filling up. If they were all there before, our choices might have been different, but now we will unfortunately be obliged to reject otherwise great presentations, simply because the proposers waited too long to ask for a slot.

It’s a tough problem to solve, though – if we had set an earlier deadline, we would not have received many of those presentations, or they would have been vague proposals like “can’t say much yet, but this’ll be a cool presentation about something related to Fremantle”. Approving presentations early allowed the council to have better information for travel subsidies and allowed people to book travel earlier and thus cheaper. But we’re going to miss out on some presentations I think would be pretty good. Pity.

In addition to the other video footage that we’ve shared from Nokia World 2009 of the Nokia N900, we were able to capture some raw footage of users simply playing around on the device. While not as immediately informative as our previous videos, I think this sort of video is definitely useful, as it shows off the general flow of things, as seen by a user without a helping hand from the demonstrator.

As you can see, there are still some areas in which the new Maemo 5 UI needs some improvement for the normal user, but there are also some hidden gems in this particular video. Pay close attention to the app catalog to see some sweet surprises!

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I haven't played with the N900 yet so I do not know this answer - but will the N900 come with any community-created apps? What's bundled inside?

There is a contents page for all these posts.

As an extension of a previous article on how to make Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) compelling, I have decided to start a series devoting individual articles to particular use cases, one per article. [...]

The British Film Institute (BFI) onedotzero_adventures in motion event kicked off at London last night and as earlier reported, the Nokia N900 made its appearance by wirelessly controlling the display, projected on to the 50m BFI Southbank’s facade.

From the looks of it, if you are at the event, you can look for the Nokia folks and play with the Nokia N900 that lets you spin, zoom, and pause what is displayed on the gigantic screen. Jussi Makinen, Nokia Maemo Devices Marketing Manager, tweeted that he was doing just that.

We have heard that some key people from Nokia will be at the event. Maemo Talk will be there this weekend to cover the Maemo specific events as it unfolds, so expect more pics and vids.

Here’s the latest video from onedotzero:

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

There has been a lot of buzz going around about Nokia, not planning to allow carrier customization for the Maemo phones (e.g. Nokia N900). Here’s a post at Nokia Conversations that clears things up (link).

Some quotes from the post:

“Many reports have erroneously suggested that Nokia will not support operator customization for Maemo devices – a fact that is simply incorrect.”
…
“While we have not announced immediate plans to offer an operator variant for the N900, there are many customization points for operators on the N900. It would be absolutely incorrect to assume that we will not offer operators the ability to tailor future Maemo devices to suit their needs.”
…
“…we wanted to clear up these few important details that appear to have been misunderstood.”

Read the full post.

After quite a bit of misunderstanding, it seems that Nokia initially implied that it would not allow carriers to customize the Nokia N900. If you’ve ever bought a Symbian phone from a carrier such as AT&T, you’re aware of the massive amount of crapware that they insist Nokia puts in there. The carriers are also well known for having random features removed, such as the FM radio from the E71x (present in the unbranded variant, the E71) and locking down the network selection, so that you cannot force the phone to use EDGE or 3G only, if you wanted.

While it sounded like a major win, and a great indication of Nokia showing some backbone to the carriers, apparently it was untrue. Other major smartphones, such as the Apple iPhone, Palm Pre, and HTC’s Android-powered phones only feature a small amount of internal carrier branding, but it seems that Nokia has backed off of disallowing carriers access to Maemo’s guts.

In a post on Nokia Conversations this morning, Nokia clarifies:

This week, there have been a number of speculative stories suggesting that Nokia will not allow for operator customization of Maemo devices. Seems a few people are getting ahead of themselves. As we have said over the past couple of weeks, our plan with Maemo is to focus on the consumer experience – integrating applications and services from Nokia, our broad community of developers and publishers and, of course, from our operator customers. While we have not announced immediate plans to offer an operator variant for the N900, there are many customization points for operators on the N900. It would be absolutely incorrect to assume that we will not offer operators the ability to tailor future Maemo devices to suit their needs.

Of course, it is fantastic to see the positive buzz building around Maemo and the Nokia N900, so we wanted to clear up these few important details that appear to have been misunderstood.

Sad to see, but it makes sense, given that Nokia definitely wants carriers to offer its new Maemo-powered flagship.

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Nokia used to be known for its Snake game, pre-installed on every device it sold. With the resurgence of Nokia’s new N-Gage gaming platform, they turned Snake into a for-pay title, unfortunately, and have since been experimenting with other titles being pre-installed. Two of the titles being installed on Nokia’s touch devices currently are Global Race and Bounce.

Global Race is obviously a racing game, and it uses the device’s built-in accelerometer for turning and whatnot. The graphics are quite nice, but the gameplay gets really old, really quickly, unfortunately. Bounce is a less sophisticated looking game, instead featuring a bouncy red ball as the main player. The object of the game is to use the phone’s built-in accelerometer to guide the ball through the various levels, avoiding enemies and pitfalls along the way.

To be honest, the game looks rather lame and cartoonish on the existing Symbian-powered touchscreen phones like the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. However, as you can see in the video below, the Nokia N900 has included some major enhancements to the graphics capabilities, and even over the TV-Out, this Bounce game looks fantastic! We can only hope this is a first baby step in an emerging gaming community for the Maemo platform.You can already play Doom on the existing Internet Tablets, which are a far cry from the capabilities shown off on the N900.

What do you think? Could Maemo eventually overtake the iPhone’s gaming community with such great graphics?

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The Maemo Guru demonstrates gaming over the N900 TV-out cable and asks if this will impact the iPhone. Forget other handhelds-- what might this do to larger gaming platforms? [...]

I like the way footnotes are implemented here: Snakes on the Web by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.

(Recorded with byzanz. My gif-fu is nonexistent or I would make it loop, but with a sufficiently long delay at the end to avoid irritation. Now you have to reload the whole page if you missed the animation.)

I'm somewhat ambivalent about the animation effect. On one hand, shiny! On the other hand, hitting tiny clickable areas is not good usability. Still, shiny!

Footnotes are kind of a personal pet-peeve of mine.

One of the more disappointing discoveries about the Nokia N900 and Maemo 5 from Nokia World’s extensive hands-on videos was the realization that the device does not actually fully support portrait mode, aside from the phone application. Clearly there are some awesome use cases for using a Maemo-powered device in portrait mode, but for whatever reason, Nokia did not see fit to enable this in the planned final production firmware for the Nokia N900.

Not to worry, since Maemo is largely driven and managed by the community, with Nokia involved, you can easily chime in with your reasons as to what parts of the Maemo operating system should work in portrait mode, and why. This thread, over at Talk.Maemo.org, begins with a request for interested Maemo community members to list out some of the applications in Maemo that you would like to see working in portrait mode. Obviously the browser is a no-brainer, but there are also other suggestions that I didn’t think of, as well.

You can chime in, as well. What areas of Maemo would you expect to be able to use in portrait mode? Personally, I think the entire UI should be able to fluidly change from landscape to portrait, based on the accelerometer. It would be easier to implement and for consumers to understand than having individual applications support it, and would leave the choice with the user. What do you think?

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Hello everyone. Today I’d like to show you my idea about Fremantle desktop behaviour. As you remember, now it has cool feature called “Panorama desktop” that allows you to scroll through 4 different desktops with a simple flick of the finger. That idea is not something extraordinary or brand new but it’s really useful. As for visualizing, [...]

There is a contents page for all these posts.

Urho Konttori has updated his awesome Theme Maker application to support the Nokia N900 (and theoretically, other Maemo 5 devices, should some others get announced). The Theme Maker application not only allows you to package a custom background and change the toolbars and buttons used throughout the operating system, but you can also apply changes to the various icons, fonts, and widgets, as well. This is definitely an in-depth theming tool, and I’m really pumped to see this thing updated to support the newest Maemo-powered handset.

Here’s a sample of the icons you can theme (these are not the official N900 ones, but rather the Oxygen ones, used simple as a placeholder).

If you’re down for some theming, you can get the latest package files from the Maemo.org Garage, and get to work. There currently doesn’t seem to be a place on Talk.Maemo.org to showcase your custom themes (though you should definitely submit them to the Garage). If you create some custom themes, let us know, we’d be glad to test them out (once we get ahold of an N900) and do a quick write up here at Maemo-Guru.com.

I personally am hoping, of course, for a camo theme, so if any themers need an idea, there you go. Free of charge.  I’m also hoping that some of the awesome themers from the Symbian ecosystem find the time to branch out and create some awesome Maemo themes.

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For software development I prefer buildout to virtualenv. This is because buildout has a text file describing the state of your working environent, which can be versioned and used later to recreate it, as well as during development to modify the environment slightly.

Nokia fans in the NYC vicinity on September 18th should check out the Nokia NY flagship store at 6:30PM. Bring whatever shiny new mobile phone you have been playing with and show it off at the meetup. I was told the Nokia N900 will make an appearance!

Where: Nokia Flagship Store. 57th st and 5th ave. NYC.
When: Friday, Sep 18, 2009. 6:30pm – 8:30pm
RSVP
Thanks to Will from S60 Users, for organizing the meetup!

What exactly happens at these monthly meetups? The flagship store reserves the entire second floor for the group to hang out, talk about phones, and play with the latest devices. Later on, we head out to get some food and drinks. It is recommended to RSVP so the store knows how many people to expect. I’ll be there. Will you join us?

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A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-09-07 through 2009-09-13

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-09-07 through 2009-09-13

A Quick Look at maemo.org Extras in Bugzilla
2009-09-07 through 2009-09-13

There are a lot of positions opened now in Maemo. Just click here, and  this should take you to a search engine which has all our opened positions. Uuse the obvious "maemo" keyword, and you will find everything from engineering to marketing positions.

In the Application team, we are looking for architects, project managers, programmers, etc... covering a lot of different areas: browsing, location, real time communication, productivity, testing, program management, services, etc...and there are openings in Finland, US (Mountain View) and Bangalore.
I -in particular - am looking for somebody to drive our development in Bangalore - if you feel up to it , don't hesitate to contact me.

Hello all. Just came up with little, but neat idea for Fremantle. It’s so little that I don’t even need “more…” tag :) As we’ve already seen on various videos, flush screen of the n900 allows to detect very first pixels of the display that opens up the door to some neat interactions for example roll-over mode [...]

The Nokia NY flagship store told their fans on Facebook that a Nokia N900 prototype is now available for everyone to play with. Don’t get too excited as it’s not for sale yet. Why not use it a bit before making a purchase decision? They are taking names and numbers for people who want to be notified when it is officially out.

The flagship store is located at
5 E 57th St
New York, NY 10022-2556
Open Mon-Sat 10am-8pm; Sun 11am-6pm
(212) 758-1980

If you don’t live near New York, I have plenty of Nokia N900 coverage here that will make you feel close to actually playing with the device.

• Nokia N900 Preview By Mobile Review
• Nokia N900 Hands-On Photos
• The Nokia Blog’s Nokia N900 Hands-On Video
• Nokia N900 Demo – Share Your Life with Pixelpipe

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• Nokia/S60 Users Meetup at NY Flagship Store September 18th
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• How To Install Power Twitter on Nokia N900 Web Browser

U.S. folks, if you have been wanting to get some hands-on time with the Nokia N900 before you pre-order one, it looks like the Nokia flagship stores in New York and Chicago now have test drive units.

The New York Nokia store is located at 5E 5th Ave, while the Chicago Nokia store is at 543 N Michigan Ave.

If you happen to try out the Nokia N900, let us know what you think by adding your first impressions on this talk.maemo.org thread.

Nokia has launched an interesting new contest this week at the onedotzero festival in London. The PUSH N900 project is hosted by Nokia, and invites anyone to tell how you would hack or mod the Nokia N900, powered by Maemo, to connect to something that you love. The project is open to anyone, and has some awesome prizes, too.

A panel of experts will judge the entries on October 25 and will select the winning entries. Each winner (or winning group) will receive N900 devices to test and implement their hack/mod on, as well as funding and support from Nokia. The finished hacks/mods will then be shared with the rest of the world through setups in the Nokia Flagship Stores around the world.

You can check out the PUSH N900 blog here, or go ahead and submit your entry here.

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Mark your calendars for September 27th. Nokia has given one of its major distributors in the United States the estimated date for the Nokia N900. Retailers usually receive their stock a couple of days after distributors ship them over. Let’s hope nothing goes wrong with the shipment and see delays similar to the Nokia N86 NAM’s release.

The suggested retail is $649 USD just as expected. Want to find which retailers will carry the Nokia N900? Try searching google for Nokia’s manufacturer number: 002L929.

Nokia kept its word for the Nokia N97 NAM and 5800 NAM as the devices became available exactly at the given estimated dates. That is not the case with the recent Nokia N86 NAM, which shows no sign on retailers’ shelves yet. Let’s see what happens with the Nokia N900.

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If you are into hacking and modding, here’s the chance for you to start thinking on how you can connect the Nokia N900 to any device that you love, and possibly get your project funded by Nokia.

On the onedotzero_adventures in motion event in London, Nokia launched a PUSH project called Nokia PUSH N900 (@PUSHN900):

The brief is simple: tell us how you would hack and mod the N900 & Maemo to connect the N900 to something you love.  An expert judging panel will be selecting winning submissions and the groups behind them will receive N900 devices, funding and support to develop their PUSH idea. And once they’re complete, we’ll share them with the rest of the world with a series of installations in Nokia Flagship Stores across the globe.

During the London event, sample projects were on display, connecting the Nokia N900 to the Arduino, Speak and Spell, Rolodex, Last.fm, and a View-Master. Checkout PSFK’s coverage.

Nokia is now accepting PUSH N900 submissions until October 5. An expert panel will judge the submissions, and the winners will be announced on October 25. Submit your idea now.

EDIT:  Download the Hacker’s Guide.

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

*Photo courtesy of PSFK

Right after finding out the expected shipping date for US retailers, we later discovered that Amazon added the preorder page for the Nokia N900. The page is so fresh, they didn’t have a product image at the time of publishing this post!

The Nokia N900 is available for preorder for $649 $588 with free 2-day shipping or $4 overnight for those with Prime accounts. Thanks @bdogg64 for the tip!

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With the Nokia N900 expected to be available in October, things are going to get really exciting, really quickly. Case in point, Amazon has already posted its pre-order page for the Nokia N900, with the pricing at $649.99, just in line with what Nokia announced at Nokia World 2009. You can get 2-day shipping, as well.

If you’re not familiar, a pre-order is where you give your financial details (credit card, authorization, etc) to the retailer, who holds onto it until they have stock of the item. The transaction is then processed as soon as the retailer has the inventory in their warehouse. This way, you get the product as *soon* as possible. Often, they’ll also include something extra, such as a Bluetooth headset or something.

If you’re interested, but don’t want to hand over your payment details so quickly, you can also call up either of the Nokia Flagship Stores in the United States (Chicago or New York) and give them your name and phone number. They’ll put you on the waiting list, and will give you a call before they release their inventory to the public.

Are you going to pre-order the Nokia N900, or are you going to wait a few weeks/months, till the price drops a little bit?

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• Tablet-Suite Group Looking For Requests

Last week I was invited to London for the onedotzero event at the BFI, where Nokia were showcasing some very cool stuff around the Maemo Plataform.

As promised, I'm starting the series on use cases for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), beginning with one that may seem unusual to many: mobile auditing and inspection. [...]

Hello everybody.

In addition to the various hands-on and demonstration videos that we recorded at Nokia World 2009, I was able to sit down with my friend Ewan MacLeod of MobileIndustryReview to chat about various things, including the Nokia N900, and what it means to the mobile industry as a whole. Given that he speaks with developers for various mobile platforms on a regular basis, Ewan is rightly interested in the developer’s edge of the N900 and Maemo.

What do you think? Does the N900 present a valuable opportunity to developers? More importantly, how do you think Nokia will address the problem of generating revenue for Maemo developers? The operating system is based on an open-source system, which typically does not support for-pay applications, for the most part.

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Inspired by the conversation here, I created a new YouTube channel called "ourMaemo." I also created the first video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-WniM2KO-E

(Sorry, this blog doesn't allow me to embed YouTube videos.)

Please help us out by adding videos of your own*.

*It doesn't have to be high-quality or have music or anything.

Need to take wide-angle photos and videos with the Nokia N900? All you need is an inexpensive fisheye lens and a rubber band (link).

Sample video:

More information.

Last time I mentioned that running bin/buildout with the -N flag makes it run faster (since it skips looking for newer versions to upgrade). You can tell buildout to do this by default by putting 'newest = false' into the [buildout] section of buildout.cfg. We'll be running bin/buildout a lot now, since we'll be making changes to the project environment, so this will save wear and tear on the '-', 'N' and Shift keys. (And, by the way, I'm not trying to soak up Google juice by repeating the word 'buildout' a lot, honest!)

A new version of mussorgsky is available in Extras-devel. Mussorgky is a metadata editor and album-art downloader  for Maemo that allows a basic organization of the music collection directly on the devices.

This time the changes are mainly on the UI:

• New main screen using fancy big buttons. Thanks to Gabriel Schulhof for his help translating the C version of this custom widget (in hildon-application-manager ) to python!
• All songs are arranged now in a big list with interactive search
• Fixed thumbnail location, so MAFW uses the thumbs generated by mussorgsky.
• Now an album with multiple artists appears only once in the albums list

And few more things here and there. As usual, feedback is welcome.

The second day of the OneDotZero experience started again with a nice chat during the breakfast, this time without devices . Was very nice to hear the ideas of my colleagues bloggers about the current state of the mobile devices market and the prosper future of this area. We talked mostly about the new N900, making comparisons with other platforms and discussing our impressions as end users of the new Maemo OS. I think in general everybody was impressed with the device.

We found early prototype Nokia N900 sample photos on Flickr before by using the code “007 001.” We don’t need that anymore because the latest firmware now includes the real camera name in the Exif data. All we need to do now is the Flickr search trick to find the latest Nokia N900 sample photos.

Sample Nokia N900 Photos

Here are some of my current favorite Nokia N900 photos probably taken by Nokia employees. Click to see the enlarged photo on the owners’ flickr pages.

Photo by mdamt. I wonder if the vignette was added using the N900.

Photo by T-P. Nice self-portrait of the N900.

Photo by chanse.arrington. One of my favorite pizza spots in NYC.

Photo by Kaltsi. Great macro shot!

Continue the Search

Don’t let me do all the hunting! You can search for more Nokia N900 sample photos by doing this query on Google:

• site:flickr.com “Taken with a Nokia N900″

Find anything interesting?

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• Ovi Store For Nokia N900 Not Open Yet But Maemo Community Finds a Way In
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• Nokia N900 Featured on Xbox 360
• New Nokia N900 Video On Photos and Sharing from Maemo

EDIT: It looks like it’s either Amazon made a mistake or the N900 is all sold-out. That was fast!
EDIT #2: It’s back!
EDIT #3: Now $6 lower at $582.99 (from $588.99).

For anyone in the U.S. looking for a good deal on the Nokia N900, Amazon.com has the N900 listed right now for only $588.99 $582.99 (no taxes with free 2-day shipping). This saves you about $60 from the original price plus it’s tax-free, but you don’t get the free Bluetooth headset that the Nokia online store offers.

Pre-order the Nokia N900 now from Amazon.com.

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

I have been pondering this for a while, but I went ahead and threw my hat in the ring for “Maemo Community Council” Some questions were asked of me over on Talk.maemo.org, so I thought I would share my answers with you all. Penguinbait’s work up to this point has been [...]

I wish there was a video of  Nokia VP for Maemo Devices, Ari Jaaksi’s presentation at OSIM World 2009. His nine slides (below) talk about making Open Source more user friendly, how Maemo is inspired by the consumer’s insights, and how Nokia is working with the community from day one. The last slide summarizes it perfectly though:

“We want to concentrate on user experience and work together on things that are generic.

This is how we can create value for our customers.”

Full Slides:

You’ve seen Ari Jaaksi and Peter Scheider’s interviews. This time, Jussi Makinen, Nokia Maemo Devices Marketing Manager, along with Andrew Flegg and Gary Birkett of maemo.org, answer questions from bloggers, including Maemo Talk’s Roger Sperberg, during the onedotzero_advetures in motion event in London.

My good pal Jay Montano of My Nokia Blog, posted a 52-minute(!) video of the session. If you don’t feel like watching the video, Jay has summarized the Q&A session, emphasizing the important points on his blog (link).

Full video:

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

My friend Jay at MyNokiaBlog had an awesome chance to chat with Jussi Makinen and the Maemo community recently, and captured the talk on video. The Q&A centered quite a bit around the hardware choices on the Nokia N900, including why it has a resistive display instead of capacitive, as well as the dual-LED question that many of you would like to ask yourselves.

Jay also went through the trouble of transcribing the video, so you can click here to read through the text version, if you don’t feel like sitting through the video.

Nokia N900 Q&A with Jussi Mäkinen and Maemo Community from MyNokiaBlog on Vimeo.

Related Posts

• Tablet-Suite Group Looking For Requests
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• Only So Excited About the N900
• Irreco Turns The N900 Into A Remote Control
• Nokia World 2009 Videos: Ewan MacLeod Of Mobile Industry Review

While interesting articles from Reuters are one way to measure the hype around the new Maemo device, another way is to measure developer participation.

There is some data to go on, though a lot is anecdotal. Firstly, I think we have seen increased traffic on the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net #maemo) with lots of new users of various backgrounds. That is an easy thing to do, to show up on IRC and ask some questions, but there are other signs of increased developer interest. Firstly, we are seeing lots of new apps come into garage, Maemo’s development platform. That is a positive thing. Not only new applications, but applications that have been around for a while are returning as well. People are fixing bugs, uploading new packages, and generally getting their software ready to put on the devices.

Another significant measure is the traffic on the developer’s list. Already through the first two weeks of September, there has been more email to the list than any other month this year except for May. In May we had 430 emails to the developer list for the entire month; sin September we have had 381 emails to the list and the month is only half over.

So taking these little data points into account, I am willing to predict the platform is going to be a big success, maybe bigger than we imagined.

One of the best parts about a full-fledged home theatre setup is that it gives you complete justification to spend $200+ on one of those fancy touchscreen uber-remote controls, and the wife can’t say a word about it. Unfortunately, that also gives her the ability to steal the remote, if she’s more technically inclined, and rob you of the pleasure of using it. Fortunately, the Nokia N900 is going to be able to fix all that, thanks to a new application called Irreco.

Most folks (myself included) have missed the fact that the Nokia N900 actually has a built-in Infrared port. This port will apparently be used by Irreco to turn your N900 into a super-fancy touchscreen remote, easily replacing those more expensive remote controls, provided the IrDA port is strong enough. Here’s a quick video of the application in action:

Definitely looks to be an awesome application, and you can then rebuke your wife’s attempts to steal the remote by saying, ‘honey, I need to make a phone call, could you please hand me my phone back?’ Double whammy.You can chat about this application and make suggestions here.

Don’t forget, you can pre-order the Nokia N900 from Amazon.com for $588.99, with free shipping.

[via: MaemoTalk]

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• Maemo Summit 2009 Kicks Off Today!
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• Hermes Syncs Your N900 Contacts With Twitter And Facebook
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• Jussi Makinen Chats With The Maemo Community

In the early days there was prelink as part of maemo. It disappeared in the n810 distribution ranges. I noticed that there is no armel deb in debian for prelink, but there were murmurs of folks hacking it to work. Push finally came to shove, and as I like C++ many of my apps on maemo have quite a few symbols that need to be resolved before the app can run.

The long story short, prelink_0.0.20090311 is up at my repo. Use at your own risk, if your device breaks you get to keep both pieces etc etc.

Initial benchmarking: for an app that uses a few libraries, is C++, and has quite a few symbols that the dynamic linker has to attend to. For a complete run before it was 5.2 seconds on a warm start, with prelink of the binary it is 2.5 seconds. Considering that in that 2.5 the app itself has to completely run, there was a huge amount of time spent, err wasted, in the dynamic linker.

Of course, if I can get hidden symbols to work too then that 2.5 might drop back to 1.5-2 seconds. But for hidden symbols you have to either wrap things in pragmas or declare each function and class as exposed or not, so for a large library its quite intrusive. But the prelink is a huge gain for no code changes, so far at least. YMMV.

It's a touch ironic that Nokia recommends using prelink for embedded devices. But that is for qtopia... maybe for the next distro prelink will reappear in the default installation.

It looks like there is a lot of hype about new N900. I don't think I'll be able to afford one for myself but there are still people who will need a dictionary program while they are offline.

4 hours spent to get the first working binary. And there is a huge amount of work to do:

• read Maemo 5 HIG doc
• change the layout of potentially everything as all the buttons are HUGE now and previous useful area got shrinked.
• work around the bug "Xephyr crashes on clicking any editable area". Hate to have compiled/make_installed thing in my system.
  

And, of course, a screenshot:

We got a couple of BeagleBoards at the office a while ago, and have been playing with them a lot. As low-powered Linux-running devices they are quite fun, and being a completely different architecture brings some interesting problems. However, there is lots of active development to improve the support, both from the kernel and userspace. There are several distributions and toolchains that can be used, and the setup is relatively painless.

To make it easier, we have written a guide on Getting started with the BeagleBoard, based on our experiences. We would be grateful for any comments or suggestions, enjoy!

(Reposted from Neary Consulting)

A new version of gPodder (2.0; "Day of the Tentacle") was released a few days ago, and it has already landed in Extras for both Chinook and Diablo. I wrote about the Maemo 4 UI changes some weeks ago, and you can enjoy them all on your tablets right now.

Tuomas Kuosmanen (tigert) has suggested some UI improvements for the Fremantle version of gPodder, and I'm currently working on implementing those ideas. First of all, there's an all-new front page:

The podcast directory (which allows you to discover new podcasts) which looked ugly previously has also been "Fremantleized", and is very usable now:

I'm still thinking about the best way to implement indicators for new, downloaded and listened episodes, but at least the GtkPaned-based split view is gone now:

The episode list is also quite unspectacular, but you can use the AppMenu to unsubscribe from the podcast (splitting up the UI in so many views automatically makes the AppMenus not so filled - good move!).

You can find some more screenshots depicting the current status of the UI in this Flickr photoset, and expect a new release next week or so.

Thinking of creating an app or widget for the Nokia N900? The official Maemo 5 User Interface docs are now at forum.nokia.com detailing usability principles, device orientation, controls, icons, dialogs, etc. There is also a GUI design interface template in PSD format, so User Interface / Experience designers out there can start mocking up apps.

The docs are in three parts:

• Hildon 2.2 UI Style Guide
• Hildon 2.2 Widget UI Specification
• Fremantle Master Layout Guide

Additional documentation is also at the maemo.org wiki.

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

You’ve seen the U.S. Amazon.com $589 Nokia N900 deal. Well U.K. folks, it’s your turn. Mobile Phones Direct is now offering the Nokia N900 (pre-order) on Vodafone and T-Mobile for FREE(!) on a new 24 and 18-month contract respectively (link).

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

For the last couple of months I have been working on a secret project which involved using liqbase to create an interactive controller on the new Nokia N900 which was used at last weeks onedotzero adventures in motion festival. This involved getting to know the device and its capabilities and making sure we were able to give the best experience possible. Its been quite a ride and together with the guys at Nokia, Weiden & Kennedy and Karsten Schmidt from Postspectacular we pulled off an impressive digital feat! The Identity is an incredible ultra widescreen 3d message with flowing ribbons of text taken from tweets and messages and can be manipulated and controlled by the N900 device. It was a sight to behold everyone who played with it did so with a massive smile on their faces! The onedotzero festival is a collaborative coming together of creatives, digital artists, executives and technical folks and hope the connections everybody made will continue far into the future. This installation took place at the BFI on Londons Southbank and will continue now on its tour around the world, hopefully evolving and growing in strength. The Nokia device performed flawlessly, allowing the public to smoothly control Karstens vision and everyone left everyone with a smile on their faces! Amongst the excitement and buzz there was a more humble symbolic achievement, this onedotzero application the first liqbase application to reach 1.0 status. Those following my work will realise how proud I am of this moment :) There were exciting new applications discovered and different inventive ways of working which the Nokia N900 device will allow us to achieve. I came away excited about the future and hope the connections we made will expand and prove fruitful in the future. Whilst at the festival, Nokia also unveiled a new initiative called the Nokia Push N900. A bunch of hardware hackers from tinker.it were given a brief of making inventive applications using the Nokia N900 device and the team did not disappoint coming up with some cool hacks - from a speak and spell which sent text messages, to a view master 3d and even an old school radio and a rolodex linked to the local contacts on the device - they looked like they had a great time creating these examples, but that is only the start - they want YOUR ideas for inventive hacks and if chosen, the best will be displayed in flagship Nokia stores around the world, so hardware hackers - get involved and make a proposal! Video overview here: http://maemo.nokia.com/videos/ Photos from the amazing 3d identity software Karsten created: http://www.flickr.com/photos/toxi/sets/72157620899002878/ onedotzero info, find out whether it will be coming to a city near you http://www.onedotzero.com/home.php liqbase information: http://liqbase.net

For the last couple of months I have been working on a secret project which involved using liqbase to create an interactive controller on the new Nokia N900 which was used at last weeks onedotzero adventures in motion festival. This involved getting to know the device and its capabilities and making sure we were able to give the best experience possible. Its been quite a ride and together with the guys at Nokia, Weiden & Kennedy and Karsten Schmidt from Postspectacular we pulled off an impressive digital feat! The Identity is an incredible ultra widescreen 3d message with flowing ribbons of text taken from tweets and messages and can be manipulated and controlled by the N900 device. It was a sight to behold everyone who played with it did so with a massive smile on their faces! The onedotzero festival is a collaborative coming together of creatives, digital artists, executives and technical folks and hope the connections everybody made will continue far into the future. This installation took place at the BFI on Londons Southbank and will continue now on its tour around the world, hopefully evolving and growing in strength. The Nokia device performed flawlessly, allowing the public to smoothly control Karstens vision and everyone left everyone with a smile on their faces! Amongst the excitement and buzz there was a more humble symbolic achievement, this onedotzero application the first liqbase application to reach 1.0 status. Those following my work will realise how proud I am of this moment :) There were exciting new applications discovered and different inventive ways of working which the Nokia N900 device will allow us to achieve. I came away excited about the future and hope the connections we made will expand and prove fruitful in the future. Whilst at the festival, Nokia also unveiled a new initiative called the Nokia Push N900. A bunch of hardware hackers from tinker.it were given a brief of making inventive applications using the Nokia N900 device and the team did not disappoint coming up with some cool hacks - from a speak and spell which sent text messages, to a view master 3d and even an old school radio and a rolodex linked to the local contacts on the device - they looked like they had a great time creating these examples, but that is only the start - they want YOUR ideas for inventive hacks and if chosen, the best will be displayed in flagship Nokia stores around the world, so hardware hackers - get involved and make a proposal! Video overview here: http://maemo.nokia.com/videos/ Photos from the amazing 3d identity software Karsten created: http://www.flickr.com/photos/toxi/sets/72157620899002878/ onedotzero info, find out whether it will be coming to a city near you http://www.onedotzero.com/home.php liqbase information: http://liqbase.net

Amazon keeps on dropping the price of its Nokia N900 pre-order, now down to $582.99! This is for the unlocked, SIM-free variant, with full U.S. warranty! Keep in mind, the Nokia N900 supports quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900MHz) and tri-band 3G (900/1700/2100MHz), which means that if you use it with AT&T’s service, you’ll only get EDGE speeds. T-Mobile’s network will support the 3G needed to really enjoy the Nokia N900.

Related Posts

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The Nokia N900 has only been on Amazon for a few days, but that doesn’t stop the online superstore from lowering the price already. It started at $649, dropped to $589, and now for preorder at $583. I can’t find it anywhere else for a lower price.

If you have a prime account, you get free 2-day shipping or $3.99 for overnight.

Want a little reminder of how the Nokia N900 works? Take a look at our hands-on video below.

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A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-09-14 through 2009-09-20

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-09-14 through 2009-09-20

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-09-14 through 2009-09-20

As stated here (and a few other places), voting for the third Maemo Community Council begins tomorrow, Monday, 21 September 2009, and will run through Sunday, 27th September 2009 23:59 UTC. Voting instructions should be sent out to all people who are eligible to vote soon.

If you'd like to see the final list of candidates, go here:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_Council/Candidate_declarations_for_September_2009

We've got a great line-up of very active community members this time. It's a very exciting time for Maemo and the five people who you choose will help guide our community for the next six months. Don't make your decisions frivolously.

Good luck to all of the candidates!

As those of you who read maemo-community might know, I've decided not to run for the council this time.

I'm really proud of being a part of the first two councils, and the level of trust Nokia placed in us with the recruitment of the debmaster; chairing the sprint meetings for the gang-of-four; the decisions over the summit and inviting us to the launch of the N900 at Nokia World.

My enthusiasm for Maemo is not diminished; indeed, with the launch of the N900, I'm as excited now as I was waiting for the launch of the 770 back in November 2005. However, after a year on the council, I'm now looking forward to six months as "just" a normal community member. I've not come to this decision easily, and I'm very happy to have had such warm words of encouragement. My reasons are two-fold:

1. There are many other members of the community who should have a chance to represent us. In particular, I'm very happy that Stephen (sjgadsby), Valério (VDVsx) and Graham (gcobb) have chosen to accept my nomination of them. The fact they're joined by the likes of Alan Bruce (qole), Gary Birkett (lcuk) and Jay Carter (zerojay) - and others - is even better.


2. The vitriol and nastiness spewed by a very vocal, but tiny, minority of people on talk.maemo.org - especially regarding the transition of internettablettalk.com to talk.maemo.org - took a lot of the fun away. Given the massive investment of time my role as chair required, taking the fun away removed one of the main motivations for me.

I still plan on being an active (and vocal) community member both as a developer, a community evangelist and as a user. I hope that if you would have voted for me, you consider voting for one of the excellent candidates we have standing (and we have many). In particular, Stephen, Valério and Graham have all been long term contributors in many different ways and are tolerant, helpful people. I will struggle to cast my single transferable vote for them, Gary, Alan and Jay.

However whomever you vote for, please do vote (once you receive your voting tokens)! I think that the Community Council has been far more effective than I ever imagined it could be when I suggested it back in 2008 and I look forward to seeing where this community will go in the next six months

So one problem with the PUSH is that it's a bit tough for us software nerds to get into the real world. What would be cool is a nice easy "apt-get install HARDWARE" ... interested? read on...


A few years ago I bought a couple of these boards for about £25.

They provide:

• 5 digital input channels
• 8 digital output channels
• 2 analogue inputs
• 2 analogue outputs (8 bit resolution)
  

You can also have up to 4 of these plugged in via a usb hub.

So, I thought... how hard can it be... and actually it is quite easy. The source is on sourceforge and I'm packaging it so you can pull libvelleman from garage, plug in a board and PUSH :)


As you can see the test program implements K.I.T.T. for you...




So now all we need is someone with an N900 to help me test it...

(Warning: Don't get your hopes up - it appears that the N900 can't (yet?) act as a normal USB host; so no plugging in printers....)

As those of you who read maemo-community might know, I've decided not to run for the council this time.

I'm really proud of being a part of the first two councils, and the level of trust Nokia placed in us with the recruitment of the debmaster; chairing the sprint meetings for the gang-of-four; the decisions over the summit and inviting us to the launch of the N900 at Nokia World.

My enthusiasm for Maemo is not diminished; indeed, with the launch of the N900, I'm as excited now as I was waiting for the launch of the 770 back in November 2005. However, after a year on the council, I'm now looking forward to six months as "just" a normal community member. I've not come to this decision easily, and I'm very happy to have had such warm words of encouragement. My reasons are two-fold:

1. There are many other members of the community who should have a chance to represent us. In particular, I'm very happy that Stephen (sjgadsby), Valério (VDVsx) and Graham (gcobb) have chosen to accept my nomination of them. The fact they're joined by the likes of Alan Bruce (qole), Gary Birkett (lcuk) and Jay Carter (zerojay) - and others - is even better.
2. The vitriol and nastiness spewed by a very vocal, but tiny, minority of people on talk.maemo.org - especially regarding the transition of internettablettalk.com to talk.maemo.org - took a lot of the fun away. Given the massive investment of time my role as chair required, taking the fun away removed one of the main motivations for me.

I still plan on being an active (and vocal) community member both as a developer, a community evangelist and as a user. I hope that if you would have voted for me, you consider voting for one of the excellent candidates we have standing (and we have many). In particular, Stephen, Valério and Graham have all been long term contributors in many different ways and are tolerant, helpful people. I will struggle to cast my single transferable vote for them, Gary, Alan and Jay.

However whomever you vote for, please do vote (once you receive your voting tokens)! I think that the Community Council has been far more effective than I ever imagined it could be when I suggested it back in 2008 and I look forward to seeing where this community will go in the next six months

I'm at the point in my hobby project where I'd like to be able to change my models without losing all my test data. And I'm too lazy to do manual dumps and edit the SQL in place before reimporting it.

I want a system

• that is transparent to the user: if my database is at schema version 1, and my code is at version 3, I want it to be automatically upgraded to version 3 on server startup.
• that is not too hard on the programmer: dropping a numbered Python or SQL script in a directory ought to be sufficient to define a transition from schema version X to schema version X+1.
• that handles errors gracefully: makes a backup of the database with the old schema version; runs my script in a transaction and aborts that transaction if the conversion fails (while showing me enough information to debug the problem).
• allows prototyping without having to increment the schema number for every little change I make to the models; I should be the one who decides that a new schema is ready to go out to the world.

I've been glancing at SQLAlchemy-Migrate, since I've been brought up to believe NIHing is Bad. But Migrate is scary. I have to admit that the longer I stare at its documentation, the less I can describe why I think so. All those shell commands—but there's an API for invoking them from Python, so maybe I can achieve my goals. I'll have to try and see.

From time to time applications need custom theming rules. Especially when the project has professional UI designers involved. So how to achieve this with GTK+?

In my introductory post here at Maemo-Guru, I’m not exactly coming off on the highest of notes. Don’t get me wrong, I do like a lot of what I see concerning Nokia’s Maemo flagship device. Its just that I’m not head-over-heels excited about it… yet.

This release brings the Fremantle version up to the current upstream release (and all Fremantle-specific tweaks are now integrated upstream). gPodder 2.0 has been released last week, and the new package version includes all changes necessary to make gPodder look good on Maemo 5. Based on your feedback, the next version of gPodder will support Maemo 5 at the same day at the release for other environments (Linux, Maemo 4 and Windows).

Don't forget to send some feedback after you've tried it out:

• Bugs should be filed here
• Rate/review gPodder in Extras-Testing (when it's been promoted)
• Discuss the new release on t.m.o

Go get it from Extras-Devel and (hopefully soon) Extras-Testing! Be sure to read the upgrade instructions if you have used an earlier version of gPodder for Maemo 5 before, so you don't run into problems.

Some highlights of the new release compared to the old releases:

• Automatic screen rotation (Portrait mode)
• YouTube user channels (try for example NokiaConversations or Rocketboom)
• Filters in the AppMenu (podcast/episode list)
• Visiting URLs (should open in web browser)
• Opening audio and video files (should open in media player)

I asked Chanse Arrington, Product Manager of Multimedia at Nokia North America, to show me the Nokia N900 in about a minute and this is what we came up with. You can see how multitasking is done on this Maemo device. I have to say I’m loving the N900 more each time I see it!

You can also watch this video in larger size on Youtube. For a video walkthrough, you can also watch my longer Nokia N900 hands-on video from Nokia World.

Thoughts on Multitasking

The Nokia N900 appears to be made for multitasking. There’s no physical button on the front of the phone, but the area of the screen you’ll be touching a lot is the upper left corner. You press it once to show all open apps then press again to show the applications grid. Clicking outside the grid takes you back to your panoramic home screen.

Complaint & Suggestion. My complaint about multitasking on the Nokia N900 is that it tries to display the thumbnails of all open apps in one screen. If you have more than 3 apps open, the thumbnail preview of each app becomes very small.

I recommend Nokia to look into how the Palm Pre uses their “card view.” It shows one full thumbnail and two partial thumbnails that are movable like the panoramic home screen. Here’s how it looks.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• New Nokia N900 Video On Photos and Sharing from Maemo
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So it looks like Thomas liked my ideas about gPodder user experience. Sweet!

New gPodder main view

I guess I need to draw some of those icons now... =) Stay tuned!

(Here is a funny thought for today: Ihink the N900 and boring meetings are the key to revive my blogging Wordpress editor works just great with the Firefox-3-based browser in the device.. )

Rygel 0.4 (Fascinating!) is out!

Last week I stumbled across an article describing how ASUS was poised to enter the electronic book market and take on Amazon's successful Kindle. [...]

News of the GSM Palm Pre releasing in October broke out today and I’m wondering if this affects your buying decision for the Nokia N900? The Palm Pre w/ SIM slot will support UMTS/HSDPA Bands 850/1900/2100, meaning European and US 3G on AT&T. No announcements for a Nokia N900 variant supporting AT&T 3G has been made yet.

Photo by offstandard / CC BY-NC 2.0

There’s a catch if you decide to get the Palm Pre over the Nokia N900. According to PreCentral, you might still need to unlock the Pre for use outside O2 or even get a QWERTZ keyboard. Here’s a quick rundown of the specs found on the Pre:

• 3.1-inch touch screen
• 320×480 resolution
• QWERTY keyboard
• 3 megapixel camera w/ LED flash
• Built-in GPS
• 8GB of user storage
• 3.5mm stereo

How does this new information affect your buying decision for the Nokia N900?

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BY ROGER SPERBERG

I got my hands on a Nokia N900 recently — for which I had to travel seven thousand miles and endure the company of five cellphone-addict bloggers for 48 hours, both courtesy of Nokia’s word-of-mouth marketing efforts — and I was utterly dazzled.

At one point I was explaining why we word-of-mouth-spreaders were performing professional work for no pay and little chance of recompense. As it happened, the question arose while we were standing outside the British Film Institute, just as evening was slipping in, using a cellphone to manipulate Matrix-like text being projected on the wall of the National Theatre opposite (the “Identity Project” of the BFI’s onedotzero festival).

We were all grinning maniacally, twisting and turning and shaking the device gleefully in our turn, playing what was essentially the world’s largest video game — 138 feet wide, 10,204x1080 luminescent pixels** cast by six 18,000-lumen projectors ["the Rolls-Royce of projectors" I was told authoritatively*]. “Sheer childish enthusiasm,” I explained. “Sincere enthusiasm. It’s the blogger form of professionalism, and it’s the kind of pay that regular jobs don’t provide.”

Later that evening, I had a rematch with Identity, as evidenced in the accompanying video, and you’ll note that although I was the one who needed the video made and the app’s developer on the N900, Gary Birkett, was there to show it off, I insisted on driving and making Gary take the video. Something really exciting was occurring and I felt myself in the very center of it.

##

NOTE: I need to describe both the events I attended and what I discovered about the N900, so I will put these into separate posts, starting with Identity. But as I have two videos for that, I’ll put the first one here:

Also, note that the video made of the Identity projection was taken by an N900 — pretty good for a cellphone camera at night!
_______________
* Compare that to the typical home projector’s 3-4 lumens.
** That’s 11,059,200 pixels in the overall display.

People,

Let’s all stop doing this:

static void
my_calling_function_wrong (void)
{
[tab]MyItem1 *item1;
[tab]MyItem2 *item2;
[tab]MyItem3 *item3;

[tab]my_long_funcion (item1,
[tab][tab][tab][tab]..item2,
[tab][tab][tab][tab]..item3);
}

And start doing this:

static void
my_calling_function_right (void)
{
[tab]MyItem1 *item1;
[tab]MyItem2 *item2;
[tab]MyItem3 *item3;

[tab]my_long_funcion (item1,
[tab]……………..item2,
[tab]……………..item3);
}

The former doesn’t make sense unless each and every code viewing text display understands Mode lines’ tab-width property. The latter just always works, with every normal text editor.

ps. The super cool guys at Anjuta have already fixed this for me. I’m sure the even more cool EMacsers and the uber cool vimers can also fix their text editors?

Unnecessary note: [tab] is a tab and . is a space in the examples.

I just released Glom 1.12, roughly in-sync with GNOME’s release schedule.

Most noticeably, Glom databases no longer require a user/password to open them, at least for the default self-hosted databases. That should be much less annoying. You’ll only need to specify a user and password when you choose to share your database over the network with other Glom users.

We’ve also cleaned up libglom a bit, and David King has shown that it can be used for a simple Qt-based Glom viewer, provisionally called qlom.

I’m currently working on a Maemo 5 (Fremantle) branch of Glom, with a radically simpler UI with picker buttons and more sub-windows. I need to get that mostly done so I have something for my Handheld Glom talk at the Maemo summit in Amsterdam. I’m planning some rants for that talk – I think it will be entertaining.

BY ROGER SPERBERG

I have beaten up on ovi.com a bit so I wanted to commend the team for getting a detail right... something small but important: persistent login and state-sharing. [...]

Soon after Rygel 0.4 was released, Peter Robinson pushed it for F12 and our good friend Bastien Nocera started testing it immediately. He found many issues and some of them were so critical that we immediately had to make a another release with fixes for those issues. Thanks Bastien!

After a brief summer motorcycling break the fall is shaping up to be quite full with conferences. Here is the current list:

• September 30th - October 1st: OpenMind and MindTrek in Tampere, Finland
  I'll give a talk about the Midgard project and how our company has evolved together with it. In addition Linux-tekijä awards, where I was in the awards committee, will be announced
  
  
• October 9th - 11th: Maemo Summit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands
  While I'm not giving a talk in the event it will be great to meet the rest of the maemo.org team, and the community around the project
  
  
• October 17th: Finhack in Forssa, Finland
  A free-form hacking event for the Finnish free software community. Expect some progress with Midgard's XMPP capabilities
  
  
• October 23rd - 25th: Midgard Gathering Helsinki, Finland
  Midgard users and developers get together to learn about the new capabilities of Midgard 9.09 Mjolnir and discuss the roadmap for the next release
  
  
• October 29th: The Open Web in Ede, the Netherlands
  NLUUGs conference on new web technologies where I'll be speaking both about GeoClue and the Midgard Content Repository
  
  
• November 11th - 13th: Semantic Search workshop in Rome, Italy
  Together with a general meeting of IKS Project participants
  
  
• November 13th - 15th: FSCONS in Gothenburg, Sweden
  The annual Nordic free software gathering where I'll be speaking about Midgard2

Looking forward to all the interesting discussions and ideas that will surely come up from these events. If you will be around in one of those, make sure to look me up and we can chat. The events will also be covered in my Qaiku stream.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-09-21 through 2009-09-27

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-09-21 through 2009-09-27

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-09-21 through 2009-09-27

Since starting this blog after my last job loss I've taken Nokia to task over what I perceive to be shortcomings and errors, particularly in staffing and ambitious enterprise projects like Ovi. [...]

After commenting on Mal Minhas’s “cost of non-participation” paper (PDF), I’ve been thinking about the cost of performing a merge back to a baseline, and I think I have something to work with.

The Onedotzero festival, which was held, on London's South Bank featured an N900 powered installation. The installation was a huge projection (on to side of the BFI), which was controlled by an N900 (accelerometer based motion and text entry). Or as the video says 'using a three inch display, to try and control a 70-foot display'. Two videos (via Nokia Conversations), which give a more detailed explanation and take you behind the scenes are embedded in the full story.

During the weekend I got inspired with the question: What could a tab-widget look like when implemented as a QGraphicsWidget and armed with QGraphicsEffects & Qt Animation framework?

This is the first try:


Without explaining any further what/why/how (except that "mouse" icon is there just to show when button is down), I'd like to ask comments on how would you want tabs to behave? Note that the goal here is to have eye candy and usability, not necessarily long battery life... ;-)

Update: To demo how this looks (and performs) in tablets, I built Qt 4.6 tp1 for N810. With reduced effects (it's after all just N810), the prototype behaves like this:


Graphics:
- Background: Aamos & Eelis
- Icons: Tango http://tango.freedesktop.org

I must say that the last year has been quite a blast. Not only has being a Maemo Community Council member been fun, but it's been a great learning experience too: it has really exposed my to the inner workings of community management (the good, the bad, and the ugly), even after having been a part of so many open source projects in the past. I am proud of my year-long tennure, though -- as well as the jobs that were performed by the other Council members -- and I feel like we're leaving some rather large shoes to fill. (Still, I am definitely resting assured in the fact that the new lineup will all do an amazing job of shoe-filling.)

Thanks to the great developers of nrnoksnes, we have now snes running on n900 fullscreen. Wiimote supported, as well as tv out.

take a look at the video:



[Edit] I ported wiicontrol on the weekend just to get this awesomness up and running. While it's great that you can play games on the go and to be able to continue later from your couch with wiimote, you can also just bring your wiimote with you and use that to play games. It's just perfect.

And kids, don't pirate games.

A couple of months ago we started a project to create a Linux application similar to Nokia PC Suite, but for maemo devices. The application is built using Python and Qt. As a first application in the “suite”, it was developed a backup application, which has the same functionalities as the osso-backup application available in the device. But here the backup application runs in the desktop and stores the backups in the PC.

Tablet-Suite main screen

Tablet-Suite features implemented

• Show device status: power, device memory, flash memory
• Show device information: OS version and Model (N800, N810)

The backup application features implemented so far are:

• Create a new backup selecting categories and output path. The backup is stored in the PC, not in the device flash memory
• Manage backups: remove and rename existing backups
• Copy backups: copy backups from pc to device, and from device to pc
• Restore backups: it is able to restore a backup stored in both pc and device

Known Issues:

• Protected devices (password) are not supported
• Application is still not stable, some bug fixes and improvements are needed

The connection between the desktop and the device is done by IP network. The user just needs to know the device IP. The current implementation uses scp and ssh to transfer data and execute commands, so it is exchanging ssh keys between the pc and the device (root user), that is why the root password is required for this alpha release. There is already a daemon implementation which will do the job in the device side, so a specific tablet-suite password will be used in the future to hopefully avoid security problems.

Comments, suggestions and feature requests are really welcome. We will release a 0.2 version for the backup very soon.

The next applications to be implemented in the suite are: Flash the Device and Install Applications. The application sources and binaries can be downloaded from Garage:

https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=1013

Below some screenshots:

Backup Main Screen

New Backup Wizard

Restore Backup

My good pal Michal Jerz of My-Symbian.com has just released his extensive preview of the Nokia N900. He provides a detailed run through of the hardware, software, side-by-side pics with other devices, and provides sample images and videos from the N900.

Interestingly, he mentions about playing videos from flash based sites. From some of the videos I’ve already seen online, YouTube, for example, was a bit choppy playing videos. His experience was quite opposite however:

“I have tested it with various Flash sites, including Flash videos. I’m glad to report that I haven’t found a single Flash video that wouldn’t play on the N900. While YouTube (the “full” version of it, not the mobile one) videos play 100% smoothly and with full frame rate…”

He also provides some screenshots of the software that I have not seen before like the rich-text email editor, calendar views, phone portrait mode screens, PDF reader app, and Documents To Go (Word, Sheet, and Slideshow) .

Sample Video:

Michal ends his review with this note:

“Even now, at the previewed unit’s early development stage, the N900 truly impressed me with its FANTASTIC PERFORMANCE, STABILITY (it was really ROCK STABLE, take my word), BEAUTIFUL and ADVANCED user interface, very high quality and full integration of TELEPHONY and INTERNET CONNECTIVITY, fast and powerful web browser, great support for VoIP (especially Skype), high quality camera and video recording and, actually, ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE. I don’t remember being that excited with any mobile device since the first Nokia Communicators and UIQ 2 phones. Really! Multiple questions posted on the forums about how the N900 compares to existing Symbian OS phones can only get one answer: they just DON’T compare, the N900 is a wholy different league. If any of the existing mobile devices can be (honestly) called a mobile computer then the N900 deserves such a name in the first place.”

Great review Michal!

Read Michal’s full review.

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

*Image and video courtesy of My-Symbian.com

The results of the third Maemo Community Council elections are now available. The following were elected the Maemo Community Council: Randall Arnold (Texrat), Matthew Lewis(penguinbait), Alan Bruce (qole), Valerio Valerio (VDVsx), and Graham Cobb (gcob). Congratulations to the new council members!

Truly, a new gaming platform is born!



The above was DrNokSnes running on a N900 :) Thanks to Konttori (author of the video also, thanks!), you can use a Wiimote to control it, even in N8x0! And of course, don’t forget to check the last seconds of the video for TV out and Wiimote control.
Very cool!
You’ll have to wait a bit until this version of DrNokSnes enters extras while I polish some of the rough edges ;)

Martyn is right, we did release Tracker 0.7!

Now remember kids. It’s only a alpha or at least unstable release. The 0.8 will be what we will call the stable series for RDF, SPARQL, the new miner infrastructure, etc.

Maemo Community Council now has four new members and one returning council member. There were 9 candidates and 5 open slots on council Candidate line up Gary Birkett (lcuk) Andrew Black (AndrewFBlack) Alan Bruce (qole) Jay Carter (zerojay) Graham Cobb (gcobb) Stephen Gadsby (sjgadsby) Matthew Lewis (penguinbait) Valerio Valerio (VDVsx) The voting system used for [...]